Sublime

I consider it a dangerous misconception of mental hygiene to assume that what man needs in the first place is equilibrium or, as it is called in biology, “homeostasis,” i.e., a tensionless state. What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task. What he needs is

The function of psychoanalysis is to increase this consciousness, indeed to help people eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

In my view, four ultimate concerns are particularly germane to the practice of therapy: death, isolation, meaning in life, and freedom.

Terence, a second-century Roman playwright, offers an aphorism that is extraordinarily important in the inner work of the therapist: I am human, and nothing human is alien to me.

In contrast to the conventional perspective of psychotherapy, however, which tends to view aspects of this struggle in terms of illness or disease and to see human beings as more or less helpless pawns manipulated by forces outside their control, I see the endeavor as potentially heroic. It contains all the elements of great myth or great drama,

What alone remains is “the last of human freedoms”—the ability to “choose one’s attitude in a given set of circumstances.” This ultimate freedom, recognized by the ancient Stoics as well as by modern existentialists,

The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers.